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There are two kinds of people in this world. 'I' people and 'we' people. I've always tried to be a 'we' person.

Turkey is immersed in a profound social and political conflict between secularists, who have been in power since the republic was founded, and an insurgent Islamic-based movement that seeks to increase the role of religion in public life.

There is much to justify Turkey's reverence for Ataturk. He is the force that allowed Turkey to rise from the ashes of defeat and emerge as a vibrant new nation.

In primary school, every day and especially on Fridays, I was supposed to say, 'I am Turkish, and I am righteous and hardworking,' But all those things did not actually turn us into Turks. This system is somehow creating fake personalities.

The Kurdish people have the right of self-determination like every other nation in the world.

But I am Armenian and I understand what it is to lose a country and lose a family and have massacres and genocides and everything against my people.

Let us form one body, one heart, and defend to the last warrior our country, our homes, our liberty, and the graves of our fathers.

And as an American colleague said to me several months ago, he said, 'I think the challenge in Jordan - and, again, this is for the rest of the Middle East - we need to define what center is. And once we can define what center is to a Jordanian, then we can decide what's left and what's right of that.

I wanted to tell a romantic and dark side of Ottoman history that was also slightly political, saying to the previous generation of writers, 'Look, I'm interested in Ottoman things, and I'm not afraid of it, and I'm doing something creative.'

I have had it up to here with the prosecutions, the government's attitude, the judiciary, the media's stance and the majority of Turks who view the Kurdish people's justified cause through a nationalist lens.